Four Queens
by Mister Buch
Summary: Set 2000 years ago during the Rachni Wars. As the rachni invade planets all over Citadel space the Council turns to the krogan army. On the planet Ontahe a proud krogan Captain is betrayed and he swears to find and behead a rachni Queen single-handedly.
1. The Captain's Messenger

**Chapter One**

Coarse dust landed with a strange weight on the luminous green filth that adorned Tojendi's armoured shoulder. It was a good thing too. That curious excess weight pulled the krogan's attention to the slime, which was eating through his armour. With a deep sigh that sounded more like a growl, he positioned his sword and scraped the acidic rachni blood to the floor. As he disturbed it, it mingled with the dust and became thicker.

'This stuff is the worst part of the job,' he muttered, cleaning the ancient blade against his pauldron. 'When you went out killing animals at home, you wanted as much blood on you as possible. It impressed folks. In this war you've got to keep shovelling the stuff off of yourself.'

From behind him appeared a small, glass-helmeted blue face. 'Not animals, Capt,' said a chirpy but velvet voice. Those gentle, feminine words would have sounded convincing to another of her kind, but to Tojendi's ears she just came off as suspicious.

'Yeah I know that,' the Captain replied, with only a small measure of irritation. 'We have spiders on Tuchanka. Big spiders that look just like these, uh… people. After killing the things every day for four hundred years, sometimes you forget that rachni can build spaceships. Sure as hell don't look like it from here.'

Naromi could see his point. Tojendi spoke at the centre of a hastily-dug subterranean tunnel, barely tall enough for his frame and making him appear even more hunched over than usual. The rachni, sentient and civilised as they were, apparently did not see the need to set up lights in their underground lairs, so she and the Captain were forced to move slowly and quietly, and with a powerful torch in one hand.

The asari wore a spacesuit over her clothes, which distorted her voice slightly and made it impossible to adjust her eyeglasses, but she had no intention of removing the helmet. Tojendi had assured her there was plenty of breathable air down here, but she was hoping the extra layer would protect her from the strongly acidic green soup the rachni secreted as a defence mechanism-cum weapon. She had been a part of the Wars for less than an hour, but had already learned that the insect people were extremely fond of that particular form of attack.

'They're strange all right. I've come to hear them sing.'

'Ain't exactly singing. Only asari reporters call it that. It's just like any other insect noise, but louder and deeper, and it's probably just battle plans at that. It's not worth hearing. That what you're doing following me all the way down here? Waiting to hear these people of yours make pretty noises like they're in a zoo?'

'Yes,' she answered simply, not noting any anger in his voice. Just curiosity and disbelief. 'I've heard a lot about their singing. And this war is… I need to hear them sing.' There was a silence, which she broke with the bubbly exclamation, 'I think they're a fascinating people!' She hoped it would annoy him.

'Fascinating how they managed to take out the rest of the group so quickly. One of them was a member of my family, so stop grinning. '

Again, Tojendi had a fine point. Humbled, Naromi nodded to herself. Despite the deaths, this whole trip had seemed like teriffic fun to her. But having the Captain around subdued her natural enthusiasm a little. She had expected working with krogan to be a bloody, comical and explosive adventure; the kind of thing the extranet shows to the seventy-year-olds and the salarian boys. But Captain Var Tojendi was a serious sort, and he brought her down. He didn't even swear.

Once the two had resumed their methodical walk through the dirt tunnel, she asked a question. 'You're not like other krogan, you know that?'

'Be quiet.'

'You see! You see? Most of your men would have told me to hakh off.'

Naromi could see the enormous, black, reptilian head shaking slightly. His thinly-accented voice rose like a rumble of thunder at the very end of a storm. 'Shows how many krogan you know. Most of my men would knock you out. You're too loud and it's endangering the mission.'

She took to whispering. 'I can't be that bad. I'm still alive, aren't I?'

'Yeah, you can handle a pistol and push things with your thoughts. Good for you. But you're not any kind of soldier, so be quiet and shine that torch in front of us.'

'Oh yes I am.'

'Beg pardon?'

'I am some kind of a soldier. Just not a high rank. I completed training and primary service with the New Commandos. That was a long time ago before I really signed up…'

The asari decided this was Tojendi's subtle way of asking her to explain her brief military background in minute detail. After a while the whispered words began to merge together and he relaxed into the job of inching forward and keeping one ear on the tone of her words. The girl was good at biotics, but she didn't realise the connection she had to the rachni. For whatever reason, she seemed to know when they were coming. Or at least, she didn't know but he could tell by her behaviour.

Muffled by the big, round helmet, the story continued for half a mile. He had to prod her from time to time to keep her going, but it was easy. This one liked to talk, particularly about herself. Once the tunnel became a little wider, Naromi started to get aggressive. As more and more of her old classmates were vilified and sentences became shorter and sharper, Tojendi readied his senses and his guns. He fixed the flashlight to his armour when she stopped whispering all together, and he held a hand to her mouth.

The hand stopped at her helmet of course, but it had the desired effect of silencing Naromi when she noticed that the krogan's palms were a strikingly different colour to the rest of him. His unexposed skin was a pale, summery yellow. She became fascinated by it for a moment, studying the parts where the yellow became a thin line of dirty, reptilian green before merging with the usual black.

Then she heard it too. A hurried scratching from beneath them. She didn't need to follow the krogan's lead to know what was responsible or where to go. Torch lights flying from left to right, they scrambled into a relatively tall cavern and backed off a little from the centre.

'Get that light on the… good.' Tojendi didn't need to say 'ground'. His machine pistols moved with mechanical precision as pieces of the soil burst open, revealing tiny arachnids bunched together in little air pockets, hurling themselves madly out of the floor and toward Tojendi's body. One by one they fell, their little bodies falling in two or three pieces, yielding to the sheer size of the bullets, until their numbers became too great.

Sacrificing the use of one pistol for a moment, the Captain jabbed a button on his back and allowed his thick helmet to slide over his head. Along the way it shunted into a ridge on his forehead. It hurt, but that happened nearly every time. The helmet snapped shut just quickly enough; the first thing he saw was that thick, slimey blood or whatever it was exploding out of one of the little drones, the force of the movement tearing off two of its legs and unceremoniously dropping the creature to the pile of fallen comrades. One less to worry about, but this suicidal tactic seemed to be gaining popularity, and soon his view was almost completely obscured by the goop of twenty or so Rachni workers, all but detonating their own bodies in the hope of their blood melting his helmet off.

It was a bizarre thing to witness, but it was proving much more effective than trying to stab him with their elongated talons had proved. Until now, these small ones had been easy work for Tojendi and his platoon. Just put your helmet on and shoot till the floor is green. But now he couldn't see, and that acid was all over him. Inside the suit was getting very warm, and the outside was heavy. There were maybe thirty of the bold insects, clinging to him and wearing his armour down.

He might have worried about his asari good luck charm, but he heard pistol shots from behind him and that curiously artificial 'whoosh' of her biotic ability creating false winds to limit the number of workers besieging them. Considering that he had met her as a mere messenger that morning, the girl could handle herself surprisingly well. Maybe she wasn't exaggerating about that military training. He'd been impressed by those asari commandos before, but this girl hadn't even seen action before.

Finally he heard some frantic clicking as she ran out of ammo, and decided there was only one thing for it. He tossed his guns behind him, hoping she would catch at least one, and threw himself to the floor. Here he rolled about, leaped up and slammed into walls, each sudden movement being rewarded with the weak crunch of the workers' brittle bones. Now the acid was on his hide in a lot of places. He kept at it. A few more battle scars wouldn't be so bad – he was just unhappy to be receiving them from soldiers the size of his foot. This embarrassment gave him more ferocity, and he threw himself harder, buffeted occasionally by biotically hurled air, until the covering fire stopped. He took a breath and stood. There was no shuffling to be heard from the little rachni.

'Are we done?'

'They… they're all gone. Are you all right?'

Rather than answer the question, which he considered unnecessary, he reached for the helmet release button, but found only his own neck, slathered in rachni blood, burning into the soft skin beneath his plates. The button and everything around it were gone. In an instant he realised he had been ignoring the pain, and the whole of it hit him at once.

Naromi told him that, 'Capt, your arm has a… big hole in it!' and as a reward she finally heard the Captain swear.

It took a minute to recover from the pain, but Tojendi spent it scraping acid from his skin and pulling away chunks of sizzling steel armour. Some of them took with them layers of skin, fused to them by sticky, boiling blood in two colours. Naromi managed not to irritate him by talking more and actually helped remove a lot of the remaining slime.

When his skin had cooled enough, he checked and found she hadn't been wrong. The underside of his arm, which had been protected only by fabric and a thin sheet of plastic, was burned almost to the bone in one spot. He tried moving it. Incredibly painful, but do-able. He would have shrugged it off, but he knew he had one more big fight to go.

'I'm all right,' he told her. 'And we must be near her now.'

'The Queen? How d'you know?'

Tojendi removed the final piece of his helmet with clenched teeth, happily invisible to the asari under his thick lips. 'Did you notice how they were tearing themselves into pieces so they could kill me?'

'Well, obviously yes.'

'Don't forget these are people, not animals.' He smiled, attempting sarcasm, but she laughed along with him. 'If a squad of people do that to themselves just to hurt you, it means either they're out of their minds or trying very hard to protect something. That something's gotta be important, and this place doesn't have anything except soil, hundreds of soldiers and my quarry.'

She nodded. 'So tell me why you came all the way down here, alone with just pistols and the thinnest sword I ever saw a krogan use, just to take the Queen?'

A derisive snort left Tojendi's charred nostrils. 'Well I guess you really haven't been soldiering long. These Queens are what the war's all about. You ought to know that th…'

'Your men are guarding every exit to this nest. There's no way she's leaving. Why did you only bring the other two men, Goddess rest their lives? Why aren't we waiting for help?'

Tojendi tried walking. It hurt. That was fine. Stiffly, he walked away from her and rested on a wall, kicking green-painted remains away from his spot. 'You didn't read the message you gave me this morning?'

She shook her head, interested.

'This is my fourth Queen. I got my third last year, and when my platoon found the holes in the ground up there, I got impatient. So I scouted the tunnels and figured this was a Queen's nest.'

The Captain could tell by Naromi's blank expression that she wasn't understanding something. It could only have been that her asari superiors hadn't told her about the whole 'four Queens' thing. It figured that the asari would be so detached from the reality and the emotion of battle that they wouldn't even count their damn kills. That's why they were losing. That's why they needed to 'culturally elevate' his people to get them out of the mess they were in with the rachni.

Considering their reputation, those asari could be pretty stupid sometimes. Every sentient species ought to have figured out that if you want to succeed at a difficult task, you have to enjoy it. The krogan enjoyed killing big, dangerous creatures. They had to, because the planet they had the misfortune to evolve on was teeming with them. They learned quick. But when you live in an enormous metal hotel in the middle of space that you didn't have to build and you don't even have to maintain, you get soft and you get stupid. If they hadn't all learned telekinesis and trained those commandos, they'd all be dead. With a severe effort, he set off walking, the girl in tow with the torch as usual.

'Do your people play a game called Rall-Rallak?' he asked. She shook her head again, looking upon him expectantly, as if he were about to reveal the secret to eternal life. 'It's just a simple stones game,' he explained. 'We gamble with it. I'll make this simple… some of the stones have faces. Queens are the highest rank. Once you get four queens, that's a 'bag' and you instantly win.'

She looked impatient. 'We have a game of slides a lot like that.'

'You do? Weird coincidence. Thing is, the krogan army has a similar arrangement. We count our progress in these Wars by how many Queens we take out. We're wiping them out, see. And there's a prize for the soldier who can get himself a full bag. No-one's done it yet.'

'You'll have saved four entire planets,' the girl said quietly, a little awed.

'There's a medal. The Blood Sphere. Highest honour the army gives out. Moment of my life. And it's gonna happen when I find the Queen and cut her pretty head off. That's why I only brought two men. The message was permission to engage. From the top.'

Naromi started talking about how maybe it was wrong to kill the Queen when they could take her hostage. Tojendi didn't think the argument was good enough to answer but he kept her talking anyway so he knew when to get ready. After ten minutes or so the asari started getting twitchy. Good. This meant they were getting close. After fifteen she was angry, and after twenty she was very worried and talking to herself. The Captain was using her strange reactions to choose direction, but in a moment she just stopped talking.

He turned to face her. The ugly, round eyeglasses had fallen from her nose and she was looking at the floor, sad and deeply confused.

This was interesting, but he wanted the Queen. Dragged her behind, he searched unaided. Finally, out of the corner of his eye, Tojendi spotted a ray of white light reflecting off a surface in the next tunnel. Odd. Shouldn't be anything shiny here. He walked in there alone, his finger coiling around the trigger of his gun. That shiny surface was organic. Running now, he realised this was no tunnel. A huge, carefully constructed cave stretched out before him with straight walls and some rustic, but beautiful, woven carpet covering the floor. Soft artificial lights shone from the ceiling in shoots and swaths, vainly designed to resemble light from the surface. There was an odd smell, and in the very centre of the room…

The hulking, deadly, defenceless rachni Queen.

Lying immobile in a pool of blood.

Headless.


	2. The Fourth

**Chapter Two**

Tojendi tried to speak but couldn't think of anything worth saying. Faintly he heard something above his head, but decided it wasn't worth investigating.

The massive severed head of the Queen smashed into Tojendi's limp body, Knocking him down and settling on his legs. His full consciousness returned to him just in time to inform him that his right was broken. A quiet but fierce growl escaped Tojendi's sneering mouth as he pushed at the head. It wasn't too heavy for him, but he only managed a few inches before buckling. This time, as the head came down one of its massive fangs sank wetly into his foot.

_He had missed his fourth Queen._ This, more than the pain from his leg or the light shining through a dripping hole in his arm, sapped his strength. He could barely move. Breathing seemed to him an extraordinarily unfair chore. He had more important things to think about. He missed the fourth hakhing Queen! He shouldn't have waited after he got his orders. Shouldn't have listened to that damn asari messenger in her ridiculous spacesuit yammering to him about coming along. Shouldn't have taken her and let her slow him down. Should have killed her.

In his silent, motionless rage the Captain failed to notice his own lieutenant making his ponderous way down a flight of stairs designed for any species but krogan. He looked to have sustained some acid burns himself as he came closer. Qell-bo was tired, and he was dragging his heavy, flat sword behind him. That cleaver had killed more rachni than any weapon Tojendi knew. Fancy modern technology but more brutal and bloody than anything from the Captain's elegant, inherited collection. The thing was wide and not too sharp at its edge, which instead had a glowing red strip of heat edging. So hot it cut like a knife through butter, even to a krogan hide. Here it served as an attempt at intimidation, cutting a scorched line into the steps as it dragged and illuminating half of him in red. Tojendi was unmoved.

Should have _killed her_.

Qell-Bo began to speak. 'Took your time getting here, Captain. I've been biotically holding this damn head up here for five minutes. Thought I heard you coming. You must have gotten lost.'

Tojendi had a hundred things to say to this, but not the strength to choose one. He settled on, 'Tenant.'

There was a wide leer on Qell-Bo's vile, greasy face. He was a sickly shade of blue-green with red spots. Ugly. Perhaps he wasn't really greasy, but it seemed that way now.

'That's my third Queen.'

Tojendi suddenly found the strength to speak. He even did so calmly. 'You had orders to wait for me, tenant.'

'Yeah, you stationed my group right above the big bug. Once our equipment figured it out it only took me a few minutes to kill them both, fight a few guard insects and find her. She's been dead for hours, Var. The hell were you doing?'

'Fighting.'

The tenant either missed the implication or simply didn't object to it. Either way Tojendi hated him.

'You call me Captain.'

'Won't have to call you that for long. This oughtta get me promotion.' He waved a Recordex in the air. Qell-Bo wasn't kidding. He would almost certainly make captain for this pathetic achievement. 'Want to hear the best part? I know where to find the fourth.'

'This _was_ the hakhing fourth.' The Captain blinked slowly to regain his calm.

'You know Tellrae? The idiot soldier with the lazy…'

'I know the names of my soldiers.'

'Course you do. Well I got old Tellrae giving me messages before they got to you. Turns out they found another big hive in the system. It's a double-header. So I'm getting my Blood Sphere and my easy life a whole lot earlier than I expected. Real simple work.'

Tojendi would not let the traitor hear him scream, but he pushed the Queen's head with all the energy he had. He still couldn't do it, but the attempt was perhaps worth the effort for one meagre reward. He had noticed a glimmer of fear in the tenant's smile as he tried lifting. That fear was instinctive; no matter how Tojendi stood he would be no match for Qell-Bo's strength, his shotgun or his famous blade. It was good to know that the bastard was still afraid of him.

The moment of weakness sparked a rage in the tenant, who leaped at his Captain with the red blade, happily poising it to drop smoothly into Tojendi's underbelly. It only fell an inch into the flesh before it stopped. The rage departed, perhaps upon sight of the Captain's broken, sorrowful face, or perhaps only on seeing his injuries. He held the sword in place, occasionally jiggling it slightly to increase the pain it inflicted, as he clumsily prepared a speech. His mouth was open in concentration as he thought for too long for the words to be effective.

At last Qell-Bo opened his fat lips to begin, but he was distracted by an electronic beeping noise from his bandoleer. As he answered it, the red blade accidentally dropped another inch, cooking more of Tojendi's innards and earning a glance from the tenant as he carefully analysed whatever information the machine had told him.

Another big smile. 'Rachni are on their way. Big ones. Warriors.' And with that the thief removed his sword edge from his commander's belly and ran for all he was worth back up those stairs.

Tojendi lay there and rested his head back, waiting to be spat at by the rachni and burned to death as a misguided act of revenge. He couldn't blame them. Her death had been for nothing.

Naromi stumbled into the room, saw the headless Queen and jumped back in shock. It looked like she had gotten a hold of herself and, thank heavens, she had taken off her space helmet. She looked at Tojendi's broken body with a sympathetic curiosity for a moment, before slowly lifting the giant head with her biotics. Before he rolled to the side, the krogan thanked her with a slight nod that she may not have seen. For appearance's sake, she put her arms about him as he lifted himself up onto his one good leg.

'Get the hell off of me. You aren't helping.'

'I'm sorry,' she said serenely. 'I really… really lost my mind for a few minutes there. I couldn't even… I was hearing voices! Sorry.'

'The Queen was talking to you I think.'

Her eyes widened a little. 'Oh,' she said, quietly.

Very slowly and with a lot of wincing and heavy breathing they found their way up the stairs, Naromi in front for the first time. There was a miserable silence. Luckily there were no more rachni between them and the entrance tunnel Qell-Bo had used. When at last they crawled to the exit Tojendi threw himself into a pretty excruciating climb out of it. Pulling the weight of a krogan body upwards through a tunnel is difficult in the best conditions. Tojendi had only one small, tired leg to support him.

When, with a push from behind, Tojendi's body did emerge from the tunnel, it dropped to the orange ground beside it in a cloud of dust. Naromi's thin, blue arms appeared next and propelled the rest of her up to a standing position, whereupon she walked out with renewed energy. After so long in the tunnels, the barren surface of the planet Ontahe seemed a lot more beautiful. Quite close to them were the remains of Qell-Bo's camp and the bodies of two murdered servicemen.

Privately, Naromi was very excited about the fact that she had saved a krogan warrior's life, but she was kind enough not to mention it now. She could tell he had been depleted by the ordeal in the tunnels, so she said nothing and let him lie face down, breathing in the dust.

This continued for nine minutes. After the first, Naromi began tapping her foot on the floor to pass the time. Another two minutes and she was humming quietly. After six minutes she was lifting stones with her biotics and seeing how far she could throw them. It was all she could do to resist the strong temptation to either try to get the Captain moving or tease him about how she saved his life. When this became boring Naromi took to staring at the back of Tojendi's head, in the hope that he would sense the attention and turn to face her. Nothing happened. Perhaps this was only an asari trait. Maybe the other races couldn't sense it.

When, after eight minutes, she relented and lifted her head again, she saw a group of fifty or so rachni soldiers appearing from behind the rocky hill she had been throwing stones at. Two of the creatures were quickly, nervously approaching. The way they walked made them seem jittery but she supposed this was just how one walks when one has so many legs. They were gaining and Tojendi still had not moved an inch.

'Capt?'

Nothing.

'Capt! There are a whole lot of rachni looking at us. Some of them are huge. Some of them are coming over here.'

Tojendi gave her a low growl in response.

'Please shoot them.'

Again, no response. The rachni were a metre away but Naromi didn't want to back away from them, leaving the Captain alone.

'You know, I saved your life just now. I think you owe me this favour!'

To her great relief, this tactic actually worked. Propelling himself upward wih strength she thought he had lost forever, Tojendi balanced his weight between his legs and stood, growling with the pain. In a second his thin, long sword was in his hand and had already cut through three rachni legs. Another swish cut the body of the bigger rachni, then the sword jarred down into the centre of the other. Both rachni fell, bleeding their sticky green waste, and Tojendi dropped the sword in it, his body slamming hard onto the ground again. This time he was face up and breathing better.

Happily, the group of rachni in the distance began retreating carefully behind the hill. Perhaps they were nervous after all.

The asari was inspired. 'All right. There's more waiting over there. Do you have medical supplies?' Again there was no answer, but a quick investigation of his body yielded no medical help. 'No medicine. We have to get you back to your platoon.'

'Be gone by now.'

'Then we have to get you to the ship I came on. It's… ah... long walk. Get up.'

Silence.

'Captain I need you to get up. We're going to find that… what's his name?'

'Qell-Bo.'

'And you're going to k… going to get him back.' She felt monstrous saying it. Spending time with the krogan had made her bloodthirsty. Or perhaps it was just that seeing so much death today had forced her to desensitise. Either way, she had come to respect the Captain and now she wanted him to stand up. He still gave her nothing.

From behind the rock, almost invisible now that they were hiding, there came a harsh medley of hums and cries. It was not pleasant to hear, and it unnerved Naromi. She wondered if it was a war cry. It became less aggravating soon enough, and sounded more like varren howling. Wounded varren.

It went on and on. Finally she realised. This was the rachni singing. This is what she had come all the way out here for. This was the moment that had taken her to the military to fight in the Wars, that had convinced her to disobey her command by abandoning ship after she had delivered her message. This was the purpose that had made her follow a krogan stranger into a suicidal assault of a rachni Queen's nest. She had actually done it. This was the rachni song.

She didn't care for it.

'That's the singing…' she said to herself, quite unnecessarily. 'It's kinda… it's not much.'

'I told you.'

Tojendi had turned his head and was trying to prop himself up with his feeble little arms.

'That you did, Capt. That you did.' She was quiet. She fell downwards a little, adopting the same pose as the Captain, though it was easier with her long arms and thin, light trunk.

For a long while they sat there, listening to the mediocre display of insect communication that sounded a little like music. Perhaps it was a dirge for their Queen. If so, she deserved better. The two figures remained motionless, gathering their strength after the blows they had taken in their persuit of the rachni. No words, but one or two empty glances were exchanged between them for close to an hour.

'I'm hungry' Naromi said when she could no longer deny the fact. 'We're going. You and me are going to kill Qell-Bo. Where is he?'

Tojendi stood and stared her down, fiercely. It took her by surprise. 'Qell-Bo has cut down twice as many rachni as I have. I will not deprive the army of that blade. He has no honour and he has murdered my men. More importantly, he stole my fourth Queen. But nothing will make me...'

The asari was bored of the speech. 'So he's getting away with it?'

'I will kill him. But I'll do it after the Wars are over. As long as I have to wait. I will kill him.'

Naromi was unimpressed. 'All right… I have a better idea. We go after the fourth.'

The krogan shook his head, slowly. 'No good. He's already on his way to it.'

Suddenly the glory of bagging four Queens became extremely important to Naromi. Propped up in the dust, she made a decision. No matter the cost, she would be present when Tojendi received his Blood Sphere. She would earn her place at that ceremony. He was already stood up, so she was going to get him walking. Then she was going to get him to her ship, make her excuses for being so late and get some medical attention for the soldier. Then they were jumping ship again and they were finding the fourth Queen. Before Qell-Bo. Whoever he was.

She jumped to her feet. Tojendi was smiling a little at her.

'I really don't like having you around,' he said. He was not kidding.

'We're going for the fourth Queen,' the asari enthused, childishly. 'We're finding it before Qell-Bo does.'

Tojendi made a few careful steps forward, then stopped. Painfully moving closer to Naromi, he threw his hand toward her face. Stiffening, she dodged awkwardly to find his right hand on her shoulder, and his left brushing some dried green blood from a ridge on her head.

'Yes we are,' he said, and he started walking.

Following the girl's lead, Tojendi shuffled forward, gaining more strength as he became accustomed to the task and found the least painful parts of his body to lean on. Neither he nor Naromi spoke very much. They each had a lot of planning to do. The meek and mournful song of the rachni seemed to follow them with the wind, but they weren't listening.


	3. Patrolling

**Chapter Three**

The twin planets Ontahe and Altahe had been given those lilting, rhyming names by the asari who had been attempting to colonise them. The rocks were close together, which made for some pretty skylines, and there was potential for full scale terraforming. Altahe was the starting point, and so once the air was made breathable a small community of adventurous young asari and bored scientists was set up to see about making the surfaces of the planets look nicer. This goal perished the moment they first made contact with the rachni. Every asari and salarian knew and feared the shape of a rachni starship, so there was no consideration of remaining on the planet to fight or hide. They ran, but none made it back alive. So many long generations of mastering language and science had left them ill equipped to run. A single ship's worth of invaders was able to manually dismember every last settler before nightfall.

Captain Kajaw Qell-Bo's newly set-up camp was lashed together on the remains of the asari site, and the occasional gashes carved by talons into the steel walls served to remind him of his enemy's proximity. The rachni were considerably less technologically advanced than either of the so-called 'Citadel' races, and to his mind seemed stupider, more like well-led monsters than a real military force. But the simple fact was that the asari didn't have much experience fighting monsters. The rachni were faster on the ground, stronger and more serious. When a rachni charged you, he meant to kill you. Most asari would rather hide and snipe than charge, and then aim to take you prisoner.

And so they were dying in thousands. That's why they needed krogan.

Qell-Bo had experience with monsters. Better, he had experience with rachni. Even better again, he had good biotics and an experimental blade that cut through them as easily as if he were hacking vines out of his way. The best weapon in Qell-Bo's arsenal, though, was in his head. Fact is, he was terrified of those things, and that made him fight harder.

Clenching his right fist to aid concentration, Qell-Bo passed another sleepless night seeing if he could master the skill of swordfighting using biotic lifting skills. If he really tried, he found he could throw the weapon forwards fast enough to go right through a bug's head and come out the other side. It wasn't efficient, but it sure would be funny to look at. And that made him happy. Maybe he could use it on the last few bugs a the end of a hunt.

The newly-appointed Captain had three Queens under his belt, as much as anyone in the army. He stole the last one from his predecessor. It was easier to kill that way. Shame about Tojendi. That quiet warrior had been lethal with that old blade of his, and more than that he was honourable. Qell-Bo had a certain admiration for that. Maybe even envy. But when one finds oneself directly above a rachni Queen's throne room with only a handful of brood warriors in front of her, how is one to resist? It was against Code, of course. Couldn't be any witnesses. But three krogan dead just doesn't compare to a hakhing Queen. No more baby rachni on Ontahe. Another world down. A night's rest. No worries. Stupid Code.

A fourth Queen would get him some ridiculous medal or other. That's what had gotten poor Tojendi so excited. Qell-Bo was hoping to sell the prize off and get a bigger shotgun with it. The so called krogan 'military' did not sit well with him. In the part of Tuchanka where he was from, there was no army and no law. No codes and no smart runts in ornate battle armour getting all the best equipment and telling you where to go and what to do. The asari were promising easy worlds to populate when the job was done, and so Qell-Bo was going to do it. Single-handed if necessary. One rachni at a time. He had no head for tactics and couldn't fathom why the Wars across the galaxy had taken the asari and their rubber-skinned salarian spies so long to fight. Sure the rachni were better and they spread like a disease, but this campaign against them was nearing its hundredth year.

It was the asari's own damn fault these freaks were crawling all over half the planets in known space. So they'd better deliver with those easy worlds. They'd just better deliver.

The sword had been levitating for hours now, and he had learned how to throw it hard and just where he wanted to. Not only was the task finished with, it was beginning to bore him. Not having the stomach to attempt any of his new Captain's paperwork, he sheathed the blade in its heavy, heat-resistant scabbard and opened the tent door. There was little else to do, so it would have to be patrolling.

Nights on Altahe were decidedly yellow. The atmosphere combining with whatever chemicals the late asari scientists has pumped into the air gave off an eerie glow that always seemed to be thirty feet or so in front of you. It was ugly, but it also gave the rachni the luxury of launching surprise attacks. Qell-Bo had doubled Tojendi's old patrol schedule, but he still felt the need to survey the situation himself regularly. These were not popular decisions among the krogan under him who only yesterday had fought as his brothers. Some of them clearly thought he was being either incompetent or cowardly, though none would say so out loud. The truth was that he was showing the rachni proper respect.

Perhaps not respect, exactly. He hated them. He swore death on the rachni from the first moment of the first battle when they killed Kasda. He hated the salarians for dragging his kind into the Wars and he hated the asari for failing so miserably to fight this war themselves. But with his whole being he hated every last rachni protecting every Queen on every world. There was a growing feeling amongst the krogan; an idea grunted between the smarter and the stronger of them. Once the asari worlds were defended, which surely wouldn't take too many years, then they'd take the fight to the rachni homeoworld. Qell-Bo would have preferred to assault the planet itself and then pick off the survivors, but a lot of folks wanted to kill every one of them by hand. Either way, no matter how long it took, the rachni would be exterminated. Every one. For Kasda.

Qell-Bo was brought out of his thoughts by a shape emerging from inside the yellow horizon. In less than two seconds two of his guns were ready to kill it. He waited like this, without breathing, until he was sure that the shape was krogan.

The scout was limping badly and gasping. Retching a little too, as if there were something at the back of his throat. 'Captain…' he breathed, once he was close enough to hear. 'Found your Queen. Five mi…'

'Five _miles?_' This was too close. The camp was placed badly. 'Where are the others? Dead?'

The scout confirmed this with his head in order to save breath. 'Got your co-ordinates here, sir.' He handed Qell-Bo a C-recorder and a computer slug.

'Anything you can tell me that isn't on this slug?' Qell-Bo asked.

'It's all in there. We didn't see much. We were hit as soon as we saw the holes. Hundreds of holes. The Queen has to be there. The rest of us were dragged…'

Qell-Bo nodded, as if to calm the scout, then quickly shot him in the face with his best gun. He was deadweight, and Qell-Bo didn't want to be slowed down when there were rachni within five miles. The poor mess died instantly, not even seeming to realise in his last moment what had happened. Two other patrol guards rushed noisily to see, and stopped behind their leader. One was smiling, the other seemed unhappy.

'The Queen's five miles away. Load up the ammo transports and alert the rest. We're going now.'

'How many?' asked the disapproving guard. His tone of voice gave away some distaste for the command.

'Everyone.'

Qell-Bo left to put on his ridiculously complex new armour. He could always dump most of it when he was in the thick of it. The guards remained behind for a few moments. Now both of them looked disheartened and suspicious. Eventually they moved, ready to follow the order.

*

Deep underground, two of the scout party were still alive. One was on the floor and silent, probably not conscious anymore. The other was bound to the wall and waiting. The swarm of rachni made clicks and buzzes and hums and whirrs as they climbed over one another, the smaller ones having more success, desperate to have a hand in the torture of the krogan who had been chosen first. Once a rachni soldier had secured a hold, it would begin cutting the flesh by claw or disgorging acid onto it.

The large hall was humid with the frenzied activity. In a corner, stuck to the wall by a combination of creeper strands, shedded teeth and a salvaged metal peg, the other krogan survivor stared, unblinking and silent, grateful for the near complete darkness. He saw only a white-yellow shred of light shining in from a cavern above. Black shapes moved too quickly across it, constantly showing him hints of what was happening to the body of his team-mate beneath him.

With his toes he felt a number of bones, too small to be krogan. Some still had dried meat attached. Though he could not see, one was still attached to skin, turning from blue to yellowish green.

This was a side of the rachni that had never been reported by the survivors who sometimes returned from being dragged down. The soldiers' careful, methodical behaviour was gone. Here there was no evidence of the vaunted hive mind or superior plans that had been so much the focus of the brief training the scout had been given. No-one was in charge here. Perhaps they were just having fun.

There was a heavy creaking sound from above and a few scraps of dirt landed on the krogan's wide head. For a brief moment the light grew greater and the prisoner saw more than twenty different rachni turn to regard him. The opening above was shut again with a short groan and then the light was extinguished.

*

At the camp, Qell-Bo loaded his guns and attached them to his shiny Captain's armour. The load would be heavy. Maybe he wouldn't bother with those shoulder plates. But he knew he'd need to be well armed.

Some people said the rachni were just like tegg beetles. They fly into an area, eat all the vegetation and smaller animals they can find, dig their tunnels and stay there until they need to expand. But Qell-Bo disagreed. The rachni were unnatural. They weren't expanding because they _needed_ to. They were just expanding, and so quickly that no two-legged civilisation could stop them.

Maybe they were just pissed that the asari had disturbed them at home. Maybe there was more to it, or maybe they just really, really liked to kill. If it was the latter, then these insects had a bloodlust to put any krogan to shame.


	4. Athame's Edge

**Chapter Four**

'Wavehood, I don't have time for a written report so I want you to explain all of this to me now.' The Captain sounded tired more than angry, but she began the conversation with her back to Naromi. Her silk-draped arms were propping her body up on a console. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, here, and just let you talk. All right… go.'

'I can explain everything Capt. There's been…'

Captain Rollo held up a hand. 'Don't call me Capt.'

'Well, don't call me Wavehood!'

Rollo finally turned to face the ensign. The matron was known for her calm nature and a uniquely person-centred leadership style. Military superiors viewed her approach with suspicion, and the younger asari maidens under her command sought ways to exploit it. Naromi Wavehood admired the Captain greatly and had never tried to 'push' her, as her peers sometimes put it.

The small transport ship _Athame's Edge_ managed to include a large, glass viewscreen in its bridge. The Captain liked its illusion of spaciousness and made a habit of addressing crewmembers in its presence. Now a field of motionless white stars seemed to surround her in an aura of calm. Naromi appreciated the pretty effect.

'I had been led to believe,' Rollo began, 'in the brief time between your transferring to my ship and your disappearance, that your last name was Wavehood. Is it not?'

'Yes, Capt…' she caught herself, '…tain. Sorry. The name was inherited by my bloodline generations ago, but we don't use it. My old tribe considered it an insult.'

The matron gave a polite nod. Perhaps her response would have been less relaxed, but she had already noticed the curious shape of the ridges of the ensign's head. Unlike most asari, her forehead and scalp were almost completely smooth. The folds started lower, nearly at the back of her head, and fanned out to form an ugly wedge above her neck. 'I see,' the Captain said. 'My apology, ensign. Now tell me why a simple messenger errand took nine hours of my time.'

Naromi didn't like disappointing the Captain like this, but she was committed to finding that fourth Queen, and she had to be ready to abandon her duty again when the time was right. She explained, with some exaggeration, how she had been press-ganged into participating in an underground assault as a personal assistant to Captain Tojendi.

'Captain Qell-Bo's account is somewhat different,' Rollo said gently.

'_Lieutenant_ Qell-Bo betrayed his Captain and…!'

A rich, near purple hand lifted its palm and silenced Naromi. Rollo's deep, dark eyes were now fixed on the ensign's. 'Let's say I didn't hear that. You clearly have strong feelings on this, so I'll give you a chance. Have a written report of the incident ready for me tomorrow when I come to the bridge. Make sure you have your facts straight about the… exchange of power among the krogan ranks. If you're exaggerating any of this, you could be in a lot of trouble.'

Naromi was annoyed, but she knew the Captain didn't need another headache on her account. It was unlikely, she decided, that she would find time to actually write this report before she and Tojendi left to find the Queen. Perhaps she had better try again.

'Captain, Qell-Bo has murdered two…'

'I don't need your opinions on the krogan, maiden!' Naromi shut up and slowly adjusted her glasses. 'I don't need my ensigns fighting on the front lines and I certainly don't need a barbarian taking up my sick bay! I want your explanation to be good. Get working on it. Dismissed.'

The bridge had seating for three crewmembers beside the Captain. At the word 'barbarian' the three chairs rotated to face the centre of the room and various expressions of surprise were adopted by their occupants. There was one gasp. Naromi merely widened her eyes.

Rollo's composure returned momentarily. 'I don't like the krogan. I make no secret of it. Now get your attention back to flying. Dis_missed_, ensign.'

Naromi turned around quickly and made for the sick bay, only losing her uncomfortable feeling when halfway there. It had been a surprise to encounter an anti-krogan sentiment from an asari officer, but a greater one to hear Rollo lose her temper. Naromi had a talent for getting on people's nerves, but this time it had been purely accidental. Best to forget it had happened and concentrate on the fourth Queen.

Tojendi was not in sick bay when she arrived. Yesterday he had been unconscious most of the day and confined there. Naromi mulled it over for a moment and correctly concluded that Tojendi had come to during the morning and immediately discharged himself. His explanation, when she found him, was 'Your healer was fawning over me. It was very uncomfortable. I don't like being purred at by hairless, blue monkeys.'

It was easy to believe that the doctor was fascinated by this particular patient, maybe even in the way he had implied. Since she had dragged his burned and cut body onboard the waiting ship, he had been the only topic of conversation among the small crew. Being suddenly introduced to a new sentient race, famed for strength, long life and a code of honour, had generated a lot of interest in the asari tribes, particularly among those who were eager to avoid pureblood offspring. Naromi herself didn't share these feelings, but she held a terrific respect for the Immovable Army, as they were becoming known.

'How do you feel, Capt?'

'Fine,' he replied. 'I'm not a Captain anymore, though. Never _was_ yours. Been cast out.'

This came as a surprise to the young ensign, though she had been puzzled by the lack of armour on Tojendi's body. Instead he wore simple cloth garments. He seemed uncomfortable in them. She sat down on the edge of the bed, causing him to stand up and pace the room. The storage room, or 'cargo bay' as the officers insisted on calling it, was larger than most rooms onboard _Athame's Edge_, and had been made into a makeshift quarters for Tojendi. Three standard bunks had been sealed together to accommodate him, and an impressive job had been done, with Naromi heavily involved, of decorating the place to make it look slightly less like a storage room. The weapons and armour suits remained on their wall, as no-one doubted the krogan's intentions.

'So…' she muttered, scratching the soft, burgundy sheets with her short nails. 'Qell-Bo convinced your generals that you killed those soldiers.'

'Battlemasters, not generals. But that's about right. He told 'em I was dead, too. When they saw me on their little vid screen they weren't too happy.'

As always, the taciturn soldier tried not to give away his feelings, though they both knew that Naromi would figure him out before long.

'So you have to expose him.'

'No, I don't. I don't have to do any damn thing. I'm out of the army now.'

Naromi tapped a tune on the bedsheets as she wondered what he meant.

'You should kill him,' she said quietly, and surprised herself. 'I mean…'

'I _will_ kill him. I told you that on the planet. But I'm not doing it now. He's too good.' Tojendi spoke as the officer who had made him a tenant. Qell-Bo had an uncanny natural gift with biotic lifting as well as good reactions and of course, his famous heat-lined blade. Tojendi loved the army too much to deprive it of a warrior with those weapons at hand. 'He should have made Captain a long time ago.'

'Yeah, and maybe he should have done it without killing his squad-mates,' Naromi spat.

Tojendi did not reply for a few minutes, and continued pacing. He wanted to defend his position, but found it impossible. To conclude the matter, he stared the asari down and told her sternly, 'I will kill him the moment he is not needed.'

'Here's what I don't get, Capt. If he's so special, why does he have to sneak around and break the Warrior's Code in order to kill a Queen rachni, huh?'

Finally she had gone too far. Moving faster than her reactions, he picked her up by one shoulder and held her in the air so that they were at eye level. Her head tilted to one side away from him, so he tilted right along with her until she was looking at him. From the look on her face the pain must have been something, but she stayed quiet for the sake of her long-term health.

Tojendi was breathing as much as speaking. '_He could have killed that Queen easily. But she was mine. Mine, messenger. I had permission. He broke Code because he's a coward, which is exactly why he didn't get any promotion under my watch_.' He dropped her. 'You don't know a thing about the Code. You try to argue it with me again and I'll snap that arm.' He caught his breath, then added, 'I will kill him the moment he isn't needed.'

The silence continued for some time, during which they heard running footsteps in a nearby corridor. Naromi spoke the first syllable of an apology before being swore at.

'That heat blade cuts through rachni limbs just like it cuts through the air,' he said at last, in a calm voice. He intended this statement to both end the conversation and show her that his anger had been quelled. If nothing else, he now had more confidence in his situation, and the girl had shut up for a while. Perhaps she would make a habit of it.

She seemed not to understand any part of the soldier's meaning. 'If you're not killing that Queen, I'll do it by myself,' she said. Tojendi snorted his derision, but he wasn't entirely sure she couldn't do it if her mind was made up.

A meal arrived shortly, carried by a delicately-dressed waif with a permanent smile on her lips. She seemed unhappy to see Naromi in Tojendi's quarters, but neither occupant felt a desire to discuss the matter and she left graciously. The food, when Tojendi attended to it, was hardly to his satisfaction, but perhaps it was the sort of thing an asari would enjoy. Naromi seemed envious at least. For the sake of nourishment, he ate it. The relative thimble of asari wine, at least, was typically delicious.

As Tojendi rested the plate on a desk, Naromi opened one side of her mouth slightly, as if to speak. Her brow was furrowed in anger, but after a moment her eyes widened and the expression switched to surprise. Her mouth closed and she fixed her eyes on some imaginary object to the left.

'Did you…?'

Her question was left unfinished when it was interrupted by the deafening sounds of metal tearing and crashing. The sound came from above them. In the following quiet moments, Tojendi leaped to the corner of the room and grabbed his sword and an asari assault rifle. He turned to the door immediately before a loud siren began blaring, via a speaker right next to his ear. He recoiled slightly before jamming the door-release with the but of the rifle. It slid open too slowly and he leaped into a corridor lit up with swinging crimson lights. The siren was even louder here, so he thundered through with Naromi and another rifle sprinting behind.

By the time they had reached the next door it was already open and the body of a flight-suited asari slumped heavily through it. As the door tried to close but found itself jamming into her thigh, a large rachni crawled over her. With a hiss of either surprise or rage, it scrambled forward. Tojendi knew this would be an easy start to a tough fight. The enemy was too far away to attack and too wild to dodge his bullets effectively. A quick burst into its centre stopped it, but he wondered how many more were in the level above them.

The route to the lift was simple until it opened. Three rachni crawled out, but Tojendi's gun was already trained on them and they had no room to move. No problem. The rachni were simply too far away to get to him, and the corridors were too narrow for them to move. He was beginning to wish all his battles with the rachni had traken place on starships, when the lift doors closed again and it began moving up. Casually he walked over and pressed the 'call' button.

They waited, listening to the siren and sounds of violence above them.

When the door opened again, there were six rachni squeezed into the carriage and already running to them. Tojendi figured that with two rifles on his side, they could finish this group and jump into the lift before it closed. Backing off slightly, he and Naromi began pouring bullets into the lift.

Only a few insects were left, crawling over the piled-up corpses of the others, when the sound of an explosion rang out behind. It had happened on the higher level, and the sound was muffled. With an agonised squeal, a piece of ceiling at the other end of the corridor buckled under some great weight and fell down. The slab of metal smashed into the floor and with it fell a billow of smoke and twenty or so surprised rachni. For a second no-one moved as Tojendi, Naromi and both groups of rachni assessed the situation. It ended as the gunfire and two screaming rachni charges simultaneously began.

Tojendi quickly removed the soldiers in the lift, but he knew he'd have to vault a mound of acid-dripping bodies to reach the door, and his top-heavy frame wouldn't make that easy. Krogan warriors were deadly and resilient, but they weren't suited to acrobatics. He turned to face the advancing enemies and with his foot kept trying to kick the thin, dead legs to one side.

Naromi was hurling her gusts of biotic wind to slow the advancing horde and Tojendi's rifle was hammering into them, but they could both see more and more rachni leaping through the hole in the ceiling to join the fight and overwhelm the krogan. There were just too many.

'Naromi, we need some space to retreat. Jump the bodies behind us and get to the lift when I… say… _now_.'

The lift doors slammed shut. They turned around just in time to see.

'_Goddess…!_'

In desperation, Naromi threw the air at the lift, hoping the biotic push would hit the button and summon the car again. Nothing happened.

'Stop _throwing things_ and shoot them!' Tojendi yelled. The asari complied, and soon enough the advance seemed to slow. Finally they stopped getting closer, but still kept coming. Tojendi smiled a little, but he was cut short by a clicking sound. No more ammunition.

Naromi heard and threw her gun across to him, but with the excitement, the rifle sailed right past him and hit the floor. It clattered sadly, sounding like a hollow, hopeless laugh. As the krogan dived to get the weapon, he heard an odd sound from behind.

_Thwip._

With no time to think, he simply grabbed the gun and shifted his bulk in the right direction to fire.

_Thwip, thwip._

Tojendi had finally hauled himself up and began firing anew, but found the rachni much further away than he expected.

_Thwip, thwip, thwip, thwip._ The sound was just behind his ear.

The horde was retreating, and with every second another rachni dropped with a bullet in its back. Tojendi knew he wasn't killing all of them. Not even most. His aim, whilst impressive, just wasn't good enough to drop a rachni with one shot. When the attackers were finally all gone he lowered his gun. Naromi's face was beaming, in her usual optimistic way, at something behind them. He turned.

A short, slender asari stood behind, dressed in thin, black armour and with skin almost as pale as Naromi's. Her lips were thin and expressionless. She lowered her long, silver hunting rifle and reloaded with a pack strapped to her belt before making eye contact.

'This way, sir,' she said to Tojendi. He nodded, making no attempt to disguise his admiration of her marksmanship. Pushing the fallen rachni out of the way, he followed her into the lift, which smoothly opened as they approached. The car began ascending to the higher deck.

'I'm huntress Saella,' said the thin one. 'I was concerned about your wellbeing and left the fight for the bridge.'

Tojendi was surprised, but didn't particularly feel like showing it. 'Thank you,' he said flatly.

Saella nodded, removed the silencer from her rifle and attached it to a pistol. As she strapped the rifle to her back she explained, 'We've been overrun. Didn't see their ship coming quick enough. They shot their boarding ramp right through our hull and just _walked_ in.'

'I guessed,' Tojendi said. 'They like to force their way into the smaller ships. My people have lost more than one shuttle this way.'

The lift doors opened again in the crew mess, presenting a floor littered with asari and rachni bodies. They heard a few rachni scuttling about far away, but little else.

Saella looked over the scene with darting eyes. 'It looks like that standoff downstairs finished most of them,' she said.

'Bridge?' Tojendi asked the huntress, and she nodded again. Behind them, Naromi was involuntarily shaking.

'Stay behind me, sir. Let me lead.' Saella didn't pronounce this as if it were a request, so Tojendi acquiesced. She knew the route better than him, after all, and she seemed to have a knack for avoiding detection.

There were no more living rachni between them and the bridge door. This seemed to relax Saella and Tojendi somewhat, but Naromi's take on the situation was different. She only noticed that there were no living asari.

When they found the bridge, Saella, several feet ahead of the others by her own insistence, opened the door. Slowly, her thin, gloved finger pushed a button on the locking mechanism. The door shot open with incredible speed, and just as quickly the huntress flew backwards into the air and disappeared from view. There was a deafening roar from the bridge. Tojendi moved quickly and hammered the lock. A force pulled his great bulk toward the open door, like a tornado sucking him closer, but his sheer weight kept him slow. Finally the door slammed shut, groaning one final time as the electric lock snapped back into place.

'Wh… what?' Naromi stammered.

'Rachni bust open your bridge viewscreen,' Tojendi told her without taking the time to make eye contact. 'We can't get in there without being thrown into space. That means we can't fly the ship.'

'Y…'

'The crew are gone. Time to get off this little ship. I have an idea.'

Naromi grabbed his arm to stop him turning away from her. Desperate for purchase, her finger wrapped itself into the round hole in his arm, burned into the limb by acid the day before in the tunnels. Bemused by the strange sensation, he faced her.

'The huntress is dead,' he said, hoping this would be enough. It wasn't. Naromi just stood there, trembling.

Tojendi placed a huge hand on top of hers, enveloping and warming it. 'Naromi?' he whispered. She didn't look at him.

'Naromi. You're in shock. I don't need this. Either you get a hold of yourself now or you stay here. Which?'

The young asari slowed her shaking. Her finger stayed in his arm, clenched down on the still-sore flesh. He removed it by force, which seemed to animate her a little, though the digit remained curled in the same position. He sighed.

'I'm going for the Queen,' he said. 'Today. I'll take the rachni's ship. I'll take my fourth Queen from underneath Qell-Bo's nose, and when he finds my sword in her head, he'll know his days are numbered. Whatever happens after I have her, I will always be ready to kill him. But before that, _I will have my fourth_.'

She nodded and straightened her finger.

'And you're coming too,' Tojendi told her with an irritation creeping into his hoarse voice. 'I need you to find her for me, so I can't leave you here. _Move_.'

They ran across the large hall and found the rachni boarding ramp. The long corridor had simply been smashed through the weak hull of the sick bay in order to give the invaders the element of surprise. Tojendi and Naromi ran though it to find the rachni vessel's enormous cargo bay. As they found a place to hide and collect themselves, Naromi realised the attacking ship must have been at least three times the size of _Athame's Edge_. The asari had been doomed from the start. Two survivors was pretty good.

Every now and again they heard clanging and scratching being echoed by the metal floor as a rachni returned to the ship. Soon enough, the enormous hollow battering ram retracted back into the bay and the battleship fired up its engines. _Athame's Edge_ lay still in space, a gaping hole punched into its side. A mess of computers, guns, glass and beautifully-dressed asari bodies floated silently by the side of the wound.

In the victorious rachni ship, the two surviving souls sat quietly behind a supply cabinet, catching their breath and planning their revenge.


	5. An Easy Hunt

**Chapter Five**

The ground above the rachni nest was pocked by countless entrance tunnels. No matter where a krogan stood in the battle, he was surrounded by the bug holes, so he had to be constantly alert. This battle was particularly rough, and for once Qell-Bo's platoon had to rely on something other than sheer numbers.

Fortunately, the squad still had their new salarian-built guns, which were deadly accurate and seemed to hardly ever need a reload, and they also had the uncontrolled bloodlust of Qell-Bo himself. Thanks to his deadly combination of superb biotic lifting, uncannily accurate shotgun shells and lightning-fast flurries of his famous cleaver, the rachni were all but exterminated, and few were left to spring out of their holes. A large team had been sent underground to eliminate those rachni who chose to remain inside and protect their Queen. They had not yet returned, so Qell-Bo imagined they had been killed. Still, they presumably had made some progress eliminating the creatures. Once the ground was clear, he reasoned, he would send in a second team. And when their survivors returned to him with the Queen's location, then he would go in himself.

But the ground was not yet clear and he was still surrounded by the holes. The sight of it, the uneasiness, filled him with rage. A spin of his head revealed four large rachni on the field, each engaged in combat with a group of his men. The bugs were outnumbered, but Qell-Bo felt as if he couldn't breathe. The men were taking _too much time_. In an instant he ran to his left and threw two shells into one of the bugs' back. The men fighting it had to leap backward to avoid the hail of metal. He then ran to his next target and cut its body into three pieces. The other two were further away, so he lifted one into the air to get everyone's attention. The fifteen soldiers on the ground tilted their heads as one, and even the one remaining rachni diverted its attention, to see the display above.

Holding it very securely, watching it thrash wildly in a stupid attempt to break free, Qell-Bo grinned and started to squeeze. His fingers began to dig into his palm as he pushed the creature into itself, cracking the legs one by one and finally snapping enough bones in its body to finish it. When he was satisfied there were no more good bones to get a good sound out of, the Captain dropped the body to the ground. It landed on the edge one of the holes and slipped away from view.

One more. Now it was time for his new trick. Qell-Bo began a dash to build up speed, and the krogan who had been fighting with the last rachni retreated ungracefully. The bug sensibly turned its attention to Qell-Bo, and one of its whip-like appendages aimed the long, mechanical poison dart launcher that had kept it in the fight for so long. It fired at Qell-Bo, who let out a roar of pure hate as he pushed the dart away with a biotic field he pulled around him. The scream continued as he threw his blade into the air. He slowed his dash and held out a fist, and in a second the sword had changed course, straightened its path, shot through the air with no interest in the wind or the planet's gravity and embedded itself in the rachni's misdsection. The bug thudded to the ground and its legs sprawled around it as the red-glowing edge of the blade melted through flesh and clattered onto the floor. There was a silence.

Qell-Bo let out a heavy breath he had held for too long, and relaxed for a moment. Quietly he retrieved his sword from the ground and also picked up the dart launcher. It was a crude device by Citadel's or even krogan standards, though he had seen the rachni wielding better weaponry on occasion. Whenever they made a battle into a firefight, the thin, agile rachni immediately gained an advantage. He wondered, then, why so many of them preferred the use of their tails, claws and erosive stomach contents. Maybe they just enjoyed the feeling. It didn't matter, as long as Qell-Bo was always ready for both kinds of attack.

A quick examination of the dart gun revealed its mysteries to the Captain. It was a simple thing to use, with a lever at its side that acted much like a trigger. It was possible, if a little tricky, to fit a krogan finger behind it. He decided to keep this one. The darts had been very effective, at least against his men, managing to knock the krogan troopers dead with only a couple of hits, provided they struck the front and pierced the skin.

The men were talking amongst themselves a little, now, and Qell-Bo turned his attention back to the missing underground assault team. He didn't want to have to waste more men on a second attack, so he gave them a little longer.

Eventually his tenant, Jaddnot, emerged with a couple of other soldiers, all three looking worse for wear. The rest of the team must have perished, but it spoke to Jaddnot's skill that she appeared calm and energetic. It was annoying that she was such an asset to him, as he didn't care for her. She was an opinionated one, too strict about following the Code, and more than that, her appearance offended him. Thing was, she looked _just like_ Kasda. The same eyes and skin colouring. The same thin, elongated head plating. Seeing her made Qell-Bo remember. Made him lose control. He had sent her down there half-hoping she wouldn't come out.

'Report, tenant.'

Jaddnot nodded. 'They're gone, sir. As you ordered. Every last one. And most of my group, too. We needed m…'

He cut her off. 'Well done. Are you fit to fight?'

Jaddnot seemed to take this as an insult, though Qell-Bo could not be sure that she wasn't right. 'Yes,' she stressed with the back of her throat. 'Ready to go in again, if you aren't quite ready to do it yourself.'

Qell-Bo tilted his head a little, challenging her to question him again. She did not.

'The Queen is ready for you,' she said. 'Surrounded and cowering.'

'Good.'

Qell-Bo started walking toward the nearest entrance tunnel. He stopped a few inches shy of the hole, a smile developing on his face.

'Ready to go in again, did you say?'

'Yes sir,' Jaddnot answered.

'Then lead the way. We'll save time.'

The tenant shrugged and cracked her neck, readying her body for another crawl through the tunnels, then climbed over a ridge into the ground. Her Captain followed, one hand wrapped around the dart gun and the other steadying his descent.

For a good twenty minutes, Jaddnot silently led her commanding officer through tunnels of various sizes. In every one there were rachni bodies to vault over, and sometimes there would be krogan dead too, with either poison darts or haphazard ashes cut into their large, exposed throats. Qell-Bo had his guide retrieve ammunition and undamaged guns from these bodies, and she carried that extra load.

Jaddnot stopped as they arrived in a large cave with a floor all but completely obscured by insect bodies. There were mutilated krogan on display, and week-old asari bodies, smelling as foul as anything Qell-Bo had encountered back home. From the damage to the krogan corpses, this appeared to be some sort of holding cell, where his captured men had been bound to walls and cut open piece by piece. Dried, discoloured blood stained those walls, and brought back to many memories. Qell-Bo stopped his breathing again and felt his fingers twitch.

'Thought you'd want to see this,' the tenant said gruffly. Qell-Bo demanded that they move on, and she obliged. The next tunnel was dark and empty, and in the next they heard the unmistakable scratching sound of a rachni preparing to pounce. The heat-edged blade was poised half a second later, and when the attack finally came it was put down quickly. The bug landed with a pained screech, three legs having been severed. It was still very much alive though. The Captain aimed his captured dart gun at the enemy's head, taking a little more time than he would with his own weapons. The gun was long and thin, a little unwieldy. With a click of the release lever a dart shot into the body, just above the rachni's beak.

The result was very amusing to the Captain. Whereas the darts killed krogan quickly and effectively, they seemed to produce prolonged pain in the rachni. It spasmed helplessly and sputtered its high-pitched cries, trying to jump to some sort of safety but unable to propel itself without all of its legs. It was a good fifty seconds before the creature finally keeled over and gave in to death.

Qell-Bo breathed again and felt calm for the briefest moment. Jaddnot's face told him she was unimpressed, perhaps disgusted, so he planted the last of the darts into her neck. She hadn't expected it so she failed to dodge, and fell loudly with her teeth bared. Just like Kasda.

Good. No more memories. No more uppity females trying to play with his head, showing him torture chambers.

Now he was alone, he would have to proceed more quickly. With a sprint he followed the direction she had been leading him. As the tunnels became larger and the amount of bodies became greater he knew he was nearing his prize.

Eventually he started to hear the Queen's frantic squawking. Jaddnot had told him that his men had her captive and ready for him in her throne room, so it was a simple matter of following her cries and eventually, the chatter among the three guards who had her pinned down.

The throne room was enormous and curiously ornate. Great sheets of thin steel lined the walls, twisted and moulded into furniture and decoration. The whole space was bathed in a warm, orange haze which gave added lustre to the delicately woven, golden thread of the carpeting. Qell-Bo was surprised when he saw this, as the Queen's cave back on Ontahe had been drab and bare by comparison.

The Queen, too, was somewhat grander. In fact, the Captain noted as he craned his head to meet her eyes, she was bigger. Much, much bigger.

As the krogan guards took a moment to acknowledge their leader, the mighty insect tried to take advantage, and dragged her heavy, sinewy body forward. The move was futile, but did earn her the full attention of Qell-Bo and his men. There was a racket of clicks and bleeps as the guns were aimed and cocked, and the Queen slumped backwards, clamping her massive, sharp mandibles together a few times in anger.

Qell-Bo lowered his weapons and looked upon her. She was a grand sight, an extraordinary being, maybe the biggest monster he had encountered in all his long years. He felt strange, and after a few seconds of contemplating her glowing eyes he realised something.

He hadn't killed her yet. He was breathing normally, too. He didn't feel tense. Qell-Bo had never spent so long in the company of a rachni without killing it.

It felt good to be able to stare one down like this. To intimidate it.

Felt _good_.

He wished he still had his dart launcher, so he could see what effect it would have on her. Probably wouldn't kill her. Just hurt a whole lot. It would be fantastic to see her thrashing around in agony like that other one had. It might take a few darts to do it. Impatiently he looked around the floor for dropped dart guns, but there were none. The Queen's personal guard must have been unarmed. Shame.

But this moment was too good, to empowering to end with a simple beheading. For the first time since his beloved Kasda's death, Qell-Bo was happy. He had his fourth Queen, the biggest hahking Queen he had ever seen, at his mercy. Just for now, there was nothing that could hurt him. Nothing.

Suddenly, Qell-Bo took a sharp step forward and lifted his blade into the air. He was delighted to see that the monster actually retreated, panicking as its leg scrabbled against the cave wall at its back. He laughed.

'_Don't worry!_' he bellowed at the monster, still holding what he assumed to be eye contact. '_You don't have to be afraid of me, monster!_'

The Queen blinked. The krogan guards glanced at each other, confused.

'_I'm just a little krogan! Just a little frog!_ What are you scared of, your Majesty? Your _Graciousness? Huh?_' With the last syllable he lunged forward again and stamped the floor. The simple smack of his foot against the soil echoed across the hall, bounced off the steel ornaments of the ceiling. It became a boom.

This moment was his.

'I saw what you did to your krogan prisoners,' Qell-Bo asked, in a threatening whisper. He wondered briefly if the twitching arachnid leviathan could hear him now. Could it even understand him? He didn't care. This was his moment.

'You like torture, do ya?' he asked. The beast was still.

He turned to face one of the nervous guards. 'You, get up top. Tell them to start digging.'

'Digging… what do…?'

'_Listen to my orders_. Tell them to get the salarian excavation equipment we were issued. Might as well use it.'

The guard nodded hesitantly and scurried off. With relief, Qell-Bo returned his gaze to the Queen's enormous, blank, circular eyes. This was his moment. He was going to make it last.


	6. The Prisoner

**Chapter Six**

Altahe's evening was settling in, and with it settled a lazy, brown sky. The near-constant gales seemed more apparent now, refusing to calm as the planet prepared to rest. The perpetually angry storm tossed about small rocks and orange dust particles, smacking them into each other as if to pass the time.

Miles from the krogan camp, the serenity of Altahe was disturbed by a grey speck on the horizon. As it dropped further into the atmosphere it began swerving this way and that, turning and falling and climbing, out of control, as if the lonely tempest had claimed a new toy. The starship quickly came close to the ground, swooping over an empty stretch of desert in every direction, before finally giving up. The tempest seemed to let the craft go, and it responded with a nosedive.

The noise would have been atrocious, had anyone been close enough to hear. The rachni battleship was pained and groaning as pieces of it flew off and embedded themselves into the planet like shattered glass. When the tip of the nose drove into the rocks, the rest of the ship dismantled itself in an untidy, unruly manner. The metal ripped itself into enormous shards and a series of internal explosions added thunder to the storm raging the surface, with billows of enthusiastic black smoke darkening the dull sky.

Finally the destruction was done, and the pieces of the wreck lay quiet. As if mocking the mighty dreadnought, at this moment a tiny shuttle transport craft emerged from behind a cloud. It softly glided downward, almost unnoticed by the winds above, settling down softly and with a long, drawn-out _hiss_. When the door opened and folded to a ramp, two figures marched in a straight line out from the scorched, but working shuttle. The figures did not stop walking when they were out but stayed moving, quickly and silently. The larger had his eyes fixed on a small tracker device in his palm.

Tojendi and Naromi were tired. After the destruction of the asari ship they had waited just one hour in the cargo bay of the rachni ship. This was long enough for them to physically recover, and for Naromi to adjust to the deaths of her crew. When they emerged from their hiding place they quickly found a curiously rustic selection of rachni firearms, and the attack was on. It had been a stealthy endeavour at first, with Tojendi creeping up to lone soldiers and cleaving their bodies. But after the first twenty kills they were noticed, and alerts were sounded. The bipedal stowaways immediately began a mad dash to the bridge, which began the inevitable struggle for command of the ship.

Naromi had provided support with the remaining fifty or so bullets in her rifle and a loud gunpowder pistol, but it was the krogan who won the ship. He fought with fresh speed, precision and calm determination, showing no emotion, never grunting or growling. Something had changed in him, she was sure. Soon the bridge was won and the door behind them was sealed shut. Tojendi had taken another acid burn to the ridges of his black head plates and Naromi's right hand had been cut pretty deep by a talon, but otherwise they were unharmed. From there it had been a simple matter of locking the doors behind them and driving the ship hard into the neighbouring planet Altahe.

It was Naromi who had figured it out. There were no other planets in the system with a hope of sustaining the rachni, and it made sense for them to populate worlds right next to each other. With some further deductions, an attempt at using the baffling rachni scanning equipment and a lot of patience, a large glut of movement appeared on the scanners. It had to be the krogan platoon. Tojendi then programmed in their destination and opened the doors. One more fight later and they were safely away in the rachni equivalent of a four-man escape shuttle.

Struggling to keep up with Tojendi, Naromi also battled baking heat, sudden gusts of wind against her head and the throbbing pain in her hand. Her body told her to rest, but she wasn't interested. For once she and her companion had the same goal in mind and the same strength of purpose. The fourth Queen must die. Still, it would have been nice if Tojendi could walk a _tad_ slower. She wondered if a conversation would remind him she was there.

'Hey, Capt? How did you learn to fly like that? I didn't think there _were_ any krogan pilots.'

Tojendi's face was hidden by his angular back hump, still draped in nothing but beige cloth, but she heard him chuckling. 'If we can't fly, how do you imagine we're winning a galactic war? You're half right, though. We don't have _pilots_ exactly. And we liked to stay on the ground back home. We had one or two starships before your salarians showed us the mass relay, but we never used 'em.'

'You're _good_ though. At flying.'

'Yes, asari, I am. I'm also good at precision shooting, bladefighting and commanding. I'm not great with chit-chat though, so please stop talking.'

They trudged onward in silence until Naromi started singing.

'Be quiet, Naromi.'

She looked up and beamed behind him. 'I like it when you use my name. It's nice.' The krogan's head shook slowly.

'Would a compliment shut you up?' he asked sincerely. 'For a few minutes? How about five minutes, huh? You're a pretty good fighter too. Or a good survivor at least. It's impressive that you've lasted this long.'

'Thanks! You know, we make a pretty good te…'

Tojendi spun to face her, angrier than he had been at any point during the siege of the battleship. 'Shut the hell _up_. _I said five minutes_.'

Naromi deliberately closed her mouth. As the march resumed, she absently remembered her first meeting with the krogan, and thinking to herself how odd it was that he never swore. Either she was a bad judge of character, or something really had changed in him since then. Maybe it was his exile from the army. He was a man of rules, she could tell that much, and having no orders to give or receive didn't sit well with him. All he had now was the fourth Queen. As she rubbed her itching, injured hand against her vest, she wondered what Tojendi would do with himself when this was over. For herself, she had decided to rejoin the asari military and make a career of it. She had been ignoring this war most of her life and it needed to be finished. But did Tojendi have the option of returning? Maybe he could expose Qell-Bo's crimes and win his position back. If not, she feared he would be lost. Come to think of it, she couldn't imagine how the soldier had gotten by before the Unified Army was formed, before the salarians had landed. She decided not to ask.

From what she understood, the krogan were brought into the galactic community, into _space_, prematurely. Every other sapient race, like the salarians and the volus, made their own way there after they discovered some prothean artefact. Then they would make contact with the Citadel and the councillors would bring them in. Every race came into the Citadel having just discovered mass effect fields, and then jumped into a blissful, mysterious technological golden age. The krogan, though, were in the middle of a nuclear winter when they made first contact with beings drastically different from them, who quietly chose not to give them an embassy and immediately signed them up for a war they had no stake in. It was little wonder that the krogan viewed the other races unfavourably. Not all of the population of Tuchanka would have taken to a warrior's life as happily as Tojendi did.

As she wondered about her leader's past, Naromi's thoughts were interrupted. A headache began to develop, throbbing out of synch with the pain in her hand. There was a very uncomfortable sensation, and a recurring intruding thought that she couldn't make out. It was if she were talking to herself, only she couldn't determine words. She knew at least that she was hearing cries of pain, pleas for mercy. No, not hearing. Feeling.

With a violent shake of her head she gave herself a moment of mental clarity and realised. It was the Queen talking to her. Just like her sister had done at Ontahe. Well, she reasoned, this was a good thing. This would help them find the Queen's location better than Tojendi's compass would.

But her head was killing her. And those cries for help were becoming clearer. It was awful to listen to. A thought occurred to her.

'Oh!'

Tojendi tuned his head a little. 'You've actually been quiet this whole time. What's up?'

Naromi slowed her walking. The krogan's eyes narrowed with understanding before she had begun to explain. 'The Queen… Queen is in my head.'

'Good. What does she say?'

'It's not like that. She's in pain. She wants help. It means Qell-Bo must have gotten to her!'

Tojendi nodded and placed a hand at Naromi's back. 'Then we move faster,' he rumbled. 'Move.'

They began striding anew, and by Tojendi's will they kept their pace until, at long last, the army camp became visible, through the yellow murk, in the distance. At this, though, the krogan only increased his speed. He had to keep a hand around Naromi's arm, now, to drag her. Her moaning and yelping gradually grew louder. Finally when Naromi shrieked and dragged her hands up to cradle her head, they stopped walking.

'I'm sick of saying this to you, girl, but I need you to shut up.'

Naromi did not reply. She looked in considerable pain. Tojendi sighed. 'If you keep this up, they'll hear us. I want to find a hiding place on the outskirts. See that big metal shack they've erected?' The asari just mumbled, so he barked in her ear. 'Do you _see the shack, Naromi?_'

Her eyes shot open. 'Yes!' she yelled, irritated. 'By the Goddess…!'

'We're going to hide behind it. That used to be my tent. We only had one, so I reckon the Captain will be there.'

Angrily, Naromi shook her head. 'Don't call him the Captain. You're the Captain! Honestly, for a krogan warrior you have… you have no backbone!'

This comment enraged Tojendi, but he showed none of it on his face. She was in control of herself and he needed to keep her like this.

'Listen, Naromi. We have to move fast or we'll be too late to kill the Queen. So if you want a part in this victory, you have to shut up. You have to ignore whatever the Queen is saying, and keep walking. Is that clear?'

She shook her head a little more, dazed.

'I said, _is that clear? _Now you say yes, Capt, and you start walking. _Now_.'

'Yes Capt!'

With a grin, she started walking, but Tojendi could see that the teeth she was flashing were gritted.

They made the rest of the walk in near complete silence, with Naromi now leading. For reasons Tojendi could not understand, she wasn't guiding him to the Queen's nest. She was marching determinedly and with a purpose clearly in mind, but always headed straight to the camp. She showed terrific strength in ignoring the Queen's telepathic interference, which rather impressed Tojendi. When it came down to it, or more likely when she wanted to, the maiden could summon an unshakable will.

The yellow of the air was gone now, and the sky was a dark, rusty red. As the night slowly fell, the red would eventually disperse and bathe the camp in calm, deep black. With heartfelt sighs Tojendi and Naromi sat themselves down and rested their backs against the corrugated metal wall of Qell-Bo's tent. They could both hear movement inside, which made relaxing difficult.

Leaning closely to his accomplice, Tojendi opened his great mouth to whisper. She turned to see, but the unexpected sight of his massive tongue made her jump a little. Her shoulder hit the metal, making the slightest noise, and they waited too see if the occupant of the tent had heard. Nothing happened. Tojendi backed off a little and spoke with a low, husky breath.

'We need to wait for nightfall before we make our move. If I do some sneaking around, maybe I can find out where the nest is. We'll find it before they do, but that will mean a big fight with her drones. You'll need to rest a little, so we wait for nightfall.'

As he spoke the last word, a great shriek of distress erupted into the air from the other side of the camp. This time they both jumped, but neither collided with the wall. Naromi's eyes began darting left and right and her head began to ache once more. They both recognised that shriek, so there was no need to say it. But why was she _here?_ Neither of them could work out an answer.

Tojendi sprang to his feet in complete silence. 'Wait here,' he breathed. 'I'm going to see where she is.' Naromi nodded and watched him vanish under the shadow cast by one side of the shack.

For a moment she felt very alone, but then her head hit her hard. It felt like the muscles in her neck were tied in a knot, and every slight twist pained her. Her vision began to blur so she took off her eyeglasses, which just made it worse. The Queen was in terrible pain. It was as if she were sobbing. As much as she hated to admit it to herself, Naromi was beginning to feel sympathetic. To a being she was here to kill. She had come all the way from the Wards to do this. She had seen good asari and krogan die along the way and she had survived a trek into a rachni nest and a escaped a space battle and stolen an enemy ship and it was all the Captain had left and _she needed to do this_.

She had told herself she was going to do this. She was going to do it.

Don't think about it. It's the right thing to do.

Had she really come all this way to kill somebody?

Some movement from inside the tent disturbed her, and she was glad of the distraction. She decided to sing to herself. It would have to be silently, but that was fine. Wrapping her arms around her knees Naromi carefully remembered the notes and lyrics of an old Thessian folk song her mothers had taught her.

It was near the end of the song when the shadow of a krogan appeared, looming over the side of the tent. She held her breath and hoped it was Tojendi.

'They've got the Queen captured a little way away from the camp,' said the shadow in a familiar voice. 'But I don't see Qell-Bo anywhere. It ain't him in the tent. I'm going over the other side of the camp to find him.'

'_Wait!_' she hissed. 'What do you mean, captured?' Had she come so far to kill a _prisoner?_

The shadow paused. 'Bound down with ropes. Can't move an inch except to snap her jaws together.'

'That's… that's…' Her head was really throbbing now.

'It's stupid. Dangerous. But Qell-Bo likes his dramatic moments. We're going to wait here awhile, once I know where he is. I don't want to kill my fourth Queen tied down. It's dishonourable. Wait here.'

And with that the shadow was gone. Naromi didn't like being alone, and this news that her mark was a helpless prisoner made her uneasy. It changed things. After a few minutes trying to sing the last verse of her song, Naromi decided that she had be sure of herself. She stood up and peered around the sharp corner of the tent. She couldn't see anything. No krogan. The camp was empty.

'Huh,' she muttered aloud, and she softly slipped around the corner. When she looked more closely she still couldn't see anyone about, but neither was the Queen in view. Perhaps if she just crept around the outskirts of the camp.

*

After an unusually short patrol, Qell-Bo returned to camp to find it all but deserted. With the exception of a few guards, the rest were indoors. He had ordered six guards and another patrol, but he saw only one man, looking at the floor and eating. The men were getting lazy. They didn't respect him, and his decision to hold the Queen alive and so near the camp had been deeply unpopular. Well, he'd get around to rousing and punishing a few of them later. First he wanted to see his prize again.

It was like an addiction. Every ten minutes or so, Qell-Bo needed, or at least really wanted, to look at her. If he was in his tent or patrolling for too long, he wondered if anything had changed. Maybe she was making some noise now. Maybe she had moved a little. Occasionally one of these or some other minor detail of the sight did change, and he was always delighted. It made him feel proud. It made him laugh, and he missed laughter. The bug's head was strapped to the floor, so to be at eye-level with her he had to bend down a little. That really made it feel better.

Sometimes Qell-Bo would talk to his captive, and sometimes he would kick her or jam his shotgun into her eyes. Most often he would just hold her gaze and wonder what she was thinking. Right now, Qell-Bo had a mind to hurt the Queen some more. So far his tortures had been simple and careful. His men had collected a stack of the rachni dart guns for him from the floor of the battlefield, but for fear of killing her too soon, he had not yet hit her with more than three darts at a time. She had thrashed and squealed plenty, but he figured her gargantuan body could take a lot more than three. He'd start with five and see how she reacted.

When he arrived he saw a considerable change from the usual sight. This time, although the Queen had not moved and was silent, someone else was with her. An asari. Young and small. He could only just make her out from this distance, but her back was to him.

The Captain choked a little with the sheer surprise. He looked around for somewhere to hide for a moment, but there was nowhere. No matter. 'Well now…' he mumbled, barely opening his lips, 'well, where the hell did you come from?' He stepped aside so as to be less conspicuous, and slid his cleaver from its scabbard. The heat from its edge warmed his leg a little and bathed him from beneath in red light.

This asari wasn't exactly the prettiest. She had a curious little wedge on the back of her head, giving her a smooth, round pate above her forehead. Her stance wasn't so feminine either, and he saw a few bruises on her exposed arms. She wore a small, black vest that revealed her attractive figure. Qell-Bo smiled a little. He liked asari. Of all the treasures the salarians had introduced his people to, these were his favourite.

As he came close enough to tell, he realised that this asari was talking to his Queen. Just as he liked to do. Her words were quiet and gentle, hard to make out. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard a 'sorry' in there. The girl was upset, cradling her head occasionally and finding it hard to look the bug in the eyes.

He was getting close now, but still pondering how best to introduce himself to this strange intruder. Certainly he didn't want her dead straight away. At least, he would need to find out if she was alone. He supposed she couldn't escape him if she ran. He could easily push her over biotically. Might as well say hello.

'Hey there,' he said warmly. The blue girl span around, almost falling over herself. She didn't speak, so he resumed his sickly greeting. 'Welcome to my…'

The very moment the asari's back had turned, the Queen gave a throaty, excited roar and tore the rope holding one of her claws to the ground. The same instant she clasped the razor-sharp claw together and drove its point through the asari's thin belly. The girl went into shock, her mouth open and her teeth moving as if speaking, and another blow impaled her chest and dropped her to the ground, dead.

Qell-Bo remained still, staring at the Queen in silence. She made a satisfied, pleasant clicking sound and stared him right back.

The claw opened up again and calmly retracted back to the floor. Evidently the Queen had no ideas about breaking the rest of her bounds. Good. Either she couldn't escape, or she was afraid of Qell-Bo. He hoped very much it was the latter, but he wasn't so sure anymore. Either way, he was very angry that his asari visitor had been killed. Once the bug was bound up again, and properly this time, there would be a long night of torture.

Qell-Bo turned back and walked to the camp, always keeping one ear open in case the prisoner should try something else. She didn't, so he walked a little faster. He had a lot to do. First there was the matter of rousing his accursed guards and having them bind the monster with shackles and more ropes. Then he had to scout around to see if there were any more asari girls wandering around his camp. When all this was dealt with he intended to collect those dart guns and work out the best way of instilling obedience in his unruly pet.

The Captain increased his strides and breathed heavily with each step. For once, he did not want to be around the Queen. Maybe he would have to behead her sooner than he had planned.


	7. The Uplifted Krogan

**Chapter Seven**

Night finally fell in the camp as the gales and various shades of rust had been driven from the sky. For a few hours the air would be clear black and the surface of neighbouring Ontahe, hanging like an enormous tapestry in the sky, would be fully visible. Tojendi found the sight worrying. The planet looked _too_ close, as if it any minute it might come crashing down.

Treading slowly out of respect, the krogan held the bloodied and punctured body of Naromi Wavehood in his arms. He was now in the very middle of the camp. Aside from the sounds of frantic struggling coming from the Queen several metres away, the ground was serene. The girl's body was very light, as well as a great deal softer than he might have imagined. Her mouth was open, as if she were in pain. Though he had tried to close it a few times with his large, thick index finger, he had been unsuccessful and had given up out of misplaced embarrassment. Her eyes were closed and her body was straight, at least.

Frowning a little, he found the back of Qell-Bo's tent, where she had been meant to wait for him, and placed her down on the dirty floor in its shadow. The wind seemed to slow down even more, blowing only a handful of dust across her. Tojendi's cousin Casmur had died back on Ontahe, in the stolen Queen's nest where Naromi had followed them. For whatever reasons, her falling to the Rachni seemed to anger him more than Casmur's. The excitable asari ensign had been a child and a charming idiot, but perhaps that in itself was why he hated to see her dead.

Turning from her, Tojendi walked calmly around the edge of the shack and headed for the front door. He felt the familiar weight of Captain's armour, borrowed for the night from Qell-Bo. The vibrant yellow colour chosen by the armour's owner didn't sit well with Tojendi, and it made him quite visible. However, that was no problem now. Tojendi had spent the last hour and a half carefully ambushing, incapacitating and shackling every single member of what was once his team. It had angered the krogan to have to do this lengthy chore while Naromi's body lay within his field of vision with her mouth wide open. He had badly wanted to close it, but he knew knocking out the soldiers was his only option. This restraint paid off now. The camp was silent and it was his. He made his way to the front door of the tent and pulled it open. It squeaked a little.

Qell-Bo had now regained consciousness, and was struggling against his manacles, growling and breathing rage through the sides of his mouth. Tojendi strolled over to him and untied the makeshift gag he had given him.

_'Men! Guar… someone get in here!'_ Qell-Bo blurted out, his eyes darting. In a moment, he calmed down. With laboured breath, he met Tojendi's eye. 'They're not coming,' he said to himself.

'No they're not.'

'And I s'pose you didn't kill them. Got 'em all tied up and gagged with underwear like this?'

'Not with underwear, no. That was just you.'

Qell-Bo spat on his captor's feet. 'Should have killed you myself,' he said, so quietly that Tojendi wondered if he were meant to hear it.

'Yes you should,' he replied. 'But I had help today. The asari was with me.'

'Uh-huh,' Qell-Bo said, understanding. 'Wasn't me. The bug got to her first.'

Something about the lack of fear in Qell-Bo's voice as he said this made Tojendi wonder if it were true. Certainly the nature of her wounds indicated that the Queen had been the killer, but he had assumed the Captain had thrown the girl to her. Perhaps not. Perhaps this had been the only purpose in the Queen's constant telepathic cries for help. Just simple rachni bloodlust. It didn't matter.

'Look, Var, what do you want here? I guess you still want that bloodstone, hey? You're taking my Queen away from me and killing her yourself?'

Tojendi nodded.

'And then what? You worm your way back into the army by turning me in? Citing the Unwritten Code all the way through a long hearing when we both oughtta be out here ridding more planets of the bugs?'

'No,' Tojendi said. 'I'm going to kill you here.'

The other krogan's eyes widened and stretched the heavy folds of skin around them. After a moment he began screaming. _'Help me! I need help in here!'_ he bellowed to the metal walls. Of course, nothing happened. Rather than shout again, he gave all his energy to trying to prise apart his shackles. All the while, his bulging eyes held a steady gaze with those of his perceived executor. 'I didn't _kill your asari, Var!_ This ain't fair! This aint… ain't Code!'

At this word, Tojendi leaned in to see Qell-Bo's eyes better. _'Shut up,'_ he demanded with such authority that the captive actually complied. 'I know it ain't Code, tenant. I think I can live with that, just this once. But you don't have to get so scared, so calm down. Listen to me. I'm gonna untie you in a minute, and I'm gonna take off this here armour of yours so you can wear it. Then I'm gonna stand here in the corner while you suit up and get all your fancy weapons, and then we're gonna settle this like we would back home. It ain't exactly right by the army, but I reckon it's fair.'

Qell-Bo stared back at him, breathing fast.

'It's fair, ain't it tenant? I'm even letting you wear Captain's armour, which I don't think you have any right to be doing.'

'Keep the damn suit of armour,' the other spat. 'Too heavy. I fight better in my old steel.' Tojendi nodded happily and was about to speak until Qell-Bo suddenly stopped wriggling. 'The manacles,' he muttered. 'Where'd you get 'em? I used all the manacles tying down the bug.'

At this Tojendi indulged himself with a deep smile. 'Same manacles. I reckon if we're going to fight nice and fair, here, then she should have the same luxury. She's in a few ropes but it won't take her long to get free. I thought it would be appropriate if she fights the winner.'

'Wh… appropriate? What?'

'Rall-Rallak,' the older krogan explained. 'Winner stays on. And four Queens to take the whole pot.'

'You lost your hakhing _mind, Tojendi!_'

'That's not so. Just wanted it to be fair. Now I'm going to unlock your cuffs, and you're going to get all your gear on. I swear by my ancestors I won't move before you draw your weapon, but by the same oath, no-one leaves this tent 'till the other's dead.'

The older, thinner krogan drew a key from the small table by his side and freed his prisoner. In silence, and with constant eye contact, the larger soldier retrieved his standard-issue steel plates and threw them on. Very carefully, he then tied his scabbard to his side and tapped a button on the blade's hilt. Finally, a shotgun seemed to leap into his hand.

Tojendi wondered if this meant he was ready, but found his answer when a blast of shotgun pellets embedded themselves in his leg and pale underbelly. He yelped as the pain took him by surprise, dropped to his knees and pulled a shotgun of his own. Trying to test the strength of his leg as he put his full weight on them, he aimed the gun. A sharp twist of pain in his leg skewed the shot, however, and the blast only hurt Qell-Bo's arm.

At least he had won some time. Through sheer determination he leaped up and blew two rounds of ammunition into the traitor's hand. He tried to fire again but a sudden, sharp, biotic yank tore the gun from his grip. The weapon skidded across the floor, cutting a tiny, silver line in the shrieking metal, and more shells were fired, this time aimed for Tojendi's face.

A simple duck allowed the huge ridge of his complex armour to absorb the impact of the pellets. He felt one of them land and bounce off his head, then pulled his sword.

Qell-Bo actually laughed at this movement, and drew his own sword, taking the time to move the gun into his left hand first. From beneath his armour, Tojendi could still see the red glow from the weapon's edge, creeping across the floor to threaten him. Quietly the old warrior cursed. He had wanted to avoid swordplay as much as possible. That blade was deadly, and it would slice through his bulky armour with ease. Nonetheless, better to fight with an inferior blade than try to dodge a shotgun in close quarters. He charged.

The curved dome of the armour punched into Qell-Bo's belly, knocking him loudly against a wall, but Tojendi knew this move had exposed his back. Sure enough, before his could move he heard the searing cleaver squealing with psychotic delight as it melted through his armour. When the glowing edge finally found soft flesh beneath the layers of artificial and natural plating, the old warrior was forced to discover new reserves of strength.

Straightening up and ignoring the pain and smell from his burnt back, Tojendi forced his opponent to withdraw the heavy weapon. Taking advantage of this time, he deftly cut through available space to embed his thin, long blade in the traitor's left hand. The wound was deep and, judging by the reaction, painful, which ought to keep that shotgun out of the rest of the fight.

Defending against Qell-Bo's blade, however, would be more than enough of a challenge by itself. Quicker than Tojendi had allowed for, it reappeared and struck against his own sword, which he tried to lift into a more useful position. After a few quick, poorly aimed slashes were exchanged, the two found their blades locked, pressing against each other in a simple, old-fashioned krogan test of strength. Their wide faces were inches away from each other now, with only the swords in-between.

_'I didn't kill your hakhing asari!'_ Qell-Bo screamed. Drops of spittle landed on the older fighter's face, warmed by proximity to the hot cleaver.

Tojendi was pushing too hard to divert attention away from the fight to answer this, so he merely continued pressing against the usurper. Perhaps this gave Qell-Bo the intended message, that this went beyond Naromi's death, or perhaps not. It didn't really matter.

Finally Qell-Bo's strength pushed the other away, making him retreat a few steps. As he steadied himself and positioned his own sword, he realised that it was seriously damaged. Melted in three places, maybe deliberately.

Primarily as a means of stalling for time, Tojendi spoke. 'You know why I didn't come find you before you left on Ontahe? Why I didn't get to you before you took my ship and my men?'

Qell-Bo did not reply. As if answering the question, the red cleaver reared into sight.

'Not because of the Code,' Tojendi continued, his voice flat. 'Not because I was too tired and not 'cause of your magic spells or your ability to turn cowardice into strength. I just didn't wanna deprive the war effort of that fine blade. But I ain't going to do that. Just going to deprive it of a thief.'

With a prolonged screech, Qell-Bo rushed forward, wildly slicing the unstoppable cleaver left and right in the air. A barely-aimed biotic push shot out of his aching, bleeding left hand and smashed the thin aluminium door from its hinges. The empty space revealed the sight of the immense Queen rachni, free and stood in the centre of camp. It had not yet begun a rampage but simply stalked the grounds, its mighty head darting left and right and various feelers twitching excitedly. For a crucial moment, Qell-Bo was frozen by the sight. Tojendi dropped down onto his injured leg and grabbed his discarded shotgun. A second later, his former lieutenant was dead, and the cleaver lay burning a small channel in the floor.

The victorious krogan took a moment to breathe hard and feel the intense agonies he had been ignoring. Finally he dropped his heat-twisted, battered sword and gripped the shining hilt of his fallen opponent's weapon. The weight was more than he was used to, but it would not be hard to adjust.

Summoning all his will, Tojendi pulled himself to his feet and turned to the door, suddenly noticing the hulking insect Queen. In that instant his pain evaporated and blind rage poured into him, mixed with feverish anticipation. Despite it all, he waited. Seventy seconds exactly, he told himself, while he calmed himself and contemplated his attack.

Sixty-eight.

Sixty-_nine_.

He fired a shotgun blast into the air. It caught the Queen's attention and she heaved her huge thorax and sharp, hard legs over to face him. Not wanting to wait, the krogan began a stride to meet her halfway.

Just as before, in his fight with Qell-Bo, the first attack came early. The Queen threw her body forward and launched a flexible, spear-tipped arm in his direction. At first Tojendi thought she had missed, but then it snapped backwards and whipped the krogan's back hard. He fell down and a second arm tried to stab his front. This time she really did miss, and just pounded her claw against the side of his armour. As the long, powerful arm recoiled, Tojendi was able to hack at it with the heat-edged cleaver. The first powerful swing cut right through her flimsy organic limb and buried the blade to its hilt in the ground.

The surprise stopped Tojendi's movement for a moment, but the rachni was too busy shrieking to take advantage. After yanking the entombed blade from the hard clay, the krogan ran forward again.

Enraged but not hindered, the Queen thrust her head forward, snapping at Tojendi with her thick, beak-like mandibles. Again the blade flourished and two of her great teeth cracked in half. Again she wailed in pain and stumbled backwards, tripping over her long, angular legs as she retreated.

Struggling to stifle a laugh, Tojendi marched forward, making up the distance. As he prepared a fresh cut to her front, she butted him, one of her great snapping jaws cutting a deep, vertical trench into his armour. Immediately, she jabbed him again, this time breaking through the armour and stabbing his chest. The wound was not deep, but the teeth came out bloody and clapping together in celebration.

Three fast blasts from Tojendi's shotgun managed only to distract her, barely breaking the skin, so he abandoned the weapon and hurled himself forwards. With a roar he brought the cleaver over his head and straight into hers. This was his strongest blow so far. The blade cracked her brittle, hard exterior and sank deep into the front of her face, between the eyes. Again she cried out and this time made a sound not unlike gasping as the blade continued to cook the muscle surrounding it.

When the damage was done, he struck again and again, hacking into her skull like a woodcutter until he felt his good leg crack under a tremendous force. With a mighty claw the Queen had grabbed hold of the leg and sharply snapped the shinbone in two. Tojendi fell, realising neither of his legs could support him, and waited for her next move.

After a few moments darting back and forth, the rachni tried a killing blow. Her arm jabbed Tojendi's exposed chest in the same spot where she had hurt him before and lifted him into the air. As she prepared to slam him down, the warrior dissected the arm. He fell to the ground, the claw still embedded inside him and attached to a length of her tentacle-like limb. Once on the floor he found himself crumpled, bleeding profusely and paralysed with pain from both legs and his chest. But he had landed right beside her neck.

Finally, both of them remained still and silent. The peace that the deep, calm night had tried to bring to the krogan camp finally appeared. Both of the Queen's arms were severed and her weak, malleable skull was cut and burned. Tojendi tried hard to lift the blade once more but found he simply couldn't move. Throughout the fight the Queen had screamed her shrill cries almost incessantly, but now it was Tojendi's turn to howl.

He was so damn close. But he _couldn't move_. He found himself very tired. He just wanted to put his head down. Come to think of it, aside from bouts of unconsciousness in the cramped sick bay on _Athame's Edge_, he hadn't slept since before he landed on Ontahe.

Tojendi was no fool, and he knew that if he closed his eyes he would collapse, and if he collapsed he would die, but he wasn't sure he even cared. The death of Naromi had truly shocked him, and he was yet to really accept that she was gone. As a Captain he had lost countless krogan under his command, but still it was impossible to believe that although that little blue mouth was still there, still open no less, and although she was hiding behind the tent like he told her, he'd never hear that annoying voice again.

The girl was dead and the army had rejected him. His legs were broken and he _just_ couldn't move. What was he fighting for at this point? Even if he could earn his place at the head of this squad, the bloodstone just didn't hold the same appeal to him now. It just didn't matter. And it was probably the girl's fault. She talked too much. She was probably talking right until the moment she died.

Tojendi stood up.

The salarians liked to claim that the greatest strength of the average krogan soldier was his ability to shrug off injuries and get back on his feet, just at the moment the rachni swarms were convinced he was dead. The more poetic among them said the krogan were gifted with 'a second life.' When Tojendi's unit had first heard this, they found it rather insulting. As if the krogan were a new weapon with a fabulous new surprise attack. Nonetheless, it was the durability of the krogan that had earned them their 'cultural elevation'. It was their resilience that had earned them the nickname of 'the Immovable Army' and that same resilience that had saved thousands of asari and salarian lives on hundreds of worlds. The strength of the average krogan soldier was the sole reason the tide of the Wars had turned, after a century. It was the reason the asari and salarians would live on, the reason their giant space station would never fall. It was the reason Naromi would be avenged. Tojendi believed it had something to do with the krogan army's system of honour, as well. It was the forging the army that had truly 'uplifted' them. The loyalty of the Captains and the value of the Code.

His eyes only half open, Tojendi summoned the strength to drive the searing, wide edge of his blade deep into the rachni's neck. Unsatisfied, he pulled it out and struck again, harder. And again, this time crashing through the cartilage at the centre of her neck. Face first, the huge head dropped onto the floor. It gently rolled back and forth for a while until it was still. The warrior started walking.

*

It was another half hour before Tojendi found Hallas by the lookout post and removed the gag in his mouth.

'Jendi?' the soldier asked, in complete surprise. 'This was you? You're alive… what…?'

Covered in healing fluids, dressed in nothing but clean linen and with a makeshift splint lashed around one leg, Tojendi smiled at his old friend. It was good to see him again. 'Qell-Bo tried to kill me and took the Queen on Ontahe. I came back to take this one.'

It took a moment for Hallas to take this in. Tojendi took the time to fully untie him. 'Sorry I had to knock you out, friend,' he said, smiling. 'I wanted the Queen to myself, so I had to make sure no-one was in my way. The other boys are all in the barracks, tied to the struts.'

Hallas just laughed, as he did so often. 'And is our new Captain tied up too?' he asked, grinning at the thought.

The injured krogan shook his head. 'He's dead. It was a fair fight, Hallas.' At this, his friend looked grave. 'It was a fair fight,' Tojendi said again, and Hallas smiled.

'A fair fight is more than he deserves. I take it you will be resuming command?'

'No. You'll be getting a new leader. I just killed a Captain. It just ain't right for me to serve with the army anymore.'

With his usual energetic enthusiasm, Hallas began protesting. It lasted a few minutes with no opportunity for Tojendi to interrupt, so finally he stuffed the improvised gag back into the officer's mouth. Today he was in no mood for Hallas' manner.

Spitting it out again, his friend chuckled. 'You're really leaving the army?' He knew there was no changing Tojendi's mind, but he sounded more fascinated than disappointed.

'Yes. By the way, I took some of your medical supplies. Sorry 'bout that. And I'll be needing to take a body bag.'

'What, for Qell-Bo?'

'No.' They both left it at that. Tojendi started to back away. He walked stiffly and it was clear from his face he was in pain. 'I'll be leaving soon,' he said. 'Give me a few hours to get away from here before you untie the others.'

'Yeah, no problem. And what am I going to tell them about our dead Captain and the headless monster out there?'

Tojendi paused. This was something he simply hadn't considered. 'Tell them the truth,' he said finally. 'I don't want you lying. Tell them the truth, Hallas.'

Though he tried to hide it, the officer looked a little relieved. 'You won't get your bloodstone,' he said solemnly.

'Yeah. Hakh it.'

Hallas could see Tojendi was eager to leave, so he nodded his head as a mark of respect. 'Where will you go?' he asked as the former Captain turned around.

Tojendi turned back. 'The asari Citadel, first. That should be an experience. After that, I'm going for a fifth Queen.'

'Bye, Jendi.'

With a nod, Tojendi left his friend forever and headed back to the Captain's tent. A little later, he set off walking back to his shuttle and carrying a light load. His body offered heavy resistance to the hike, but he persevered. The sooner he got to the shuttle, the sooner he found his fifth. Then the sixth. He had a bag, but he wanted a double bag. Maybe even a full rack in a few years. With his new blade, it wasn't an unreasonable goal, and he would probably move faster without a squad to look after.

The nights were short on Altahe. After a while the contented black sky gave way to a merciless sun and dirty orange mists. After this the subdued winds started to pick up again. Eventually the storm was back to full force, hurling dust and stones all over and making vision nearly impossible. It all just made Tojendi walk faster.

________

If you read this far, thank you very much. This was my first attempt at writing an action/adventure story (actually my first fanfic not to be some kind of parody), so I hope you enjoyed it!

Also- if you spotted the 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' references I planted in there, you stand to win a special prize!

Buch


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